Interview with Ned on Maxithlon’s reforms

Hi Ned, last seasons were full of new changes in game. Do you want to talk about them and explain us your reasons? Sorry about that if we forget some important change 🙂We start from the latest and maybe the most discussed one: “Upcoming changes to attendance calculations”.

“The new formula will be quite complex, but will tend to have a logarithmic trend, which will begin to grow with very few supporters of the athletes and the members of the home club who will increase in importance. As the number of spectators becomes greater the number of supporters will lead, individually, to fewer spectators.
This new formula will also differ in the calculation based on the type of competition, so every competition will have a different multiplier than the others, unlike the current situation, where there were no differences between the various types of competitions.”

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We know you don’t like to reveal everything about some aspects in the game but, what do we have to expect about this change? The target is to level the competition’s incomes or we will see a real reduction of all the incomes in all the teams?

Yes, we insert all these changes in order to modify the teams’ incomes. In many team, meetings were too much important and we want to swap it with the official competitions. It’s hard to say who will gain or who will lose incomes. It’s sure that all the strategies will change and probably the competition will increase (and in the meantime also the competitions’ number increased). Anyway, incomes’ stability is not necessarily equal to reduction of it…

In the reasons of this change there is a further disincentive to fight the fans’ trade. Did you want it since from the start or did it happen for the formula you chose?

With the fans’ trade you could have too much benefits so we want to correct it. Probably, this phenomenon will continue to exist, but it will suffer a decrease of convenience.

But this new formula will be used also in NL? I think yes for this sentence in a news: there will be added a further factor, only for the National League events: the number of active levels of the nation (so, considering all the conditions and level of series equally, the teams participating in a NL with a smaller number of active levels will have a lower income). So, what we have to expect about NL for your foresight? Italian managers surely accepted willingly this new change.

I’ve to do a clarification about it: you don’t have to read the news in a punitive way for the little countries. The news says only that with the same factors, little countries will have, pro rata, lower incomes, but the news don’t compare future incomes with the old incomes. However, these new factors will gradually entry in the game so, the effects will be noted in the next seasons.In the new season it will be hard to note great differences from the past but everybody can adapt to the new incomes’ distribution. For the other things, the answer is “yes”. During the changes evolution, we tried to differentiate the incomes by the countries in order to cancel some wrongness created by the active users’ number in the nations. From the next seasons, the biggest countries will have few compensations compared to the smallest countries so in this way they can compete on equal.

If we will really see a decrease in the meeting’s attendance, don’t we risk to have a crisis (or a difficult economic position) for all the manager wich heavely invested in the arena and now they will probably see an extension on time to recover the investment?

I guess that this question could be done by all the users which dind’t depreciate the arena during the time. I say in this way becouse all the users which will see an incomes’ decreasing, they have largely recovered the investment in the previous seasons. Anyway, i don’t think that the arena will become the worst investment in Maxithlon, but in time a little longer, it’s still rewarding (btw, we have to think about some old teams which leave the game; official events now are more than in the past so you can have new candidacies; the average numbers of athletes in the team continues to increase ecc ecc).

MeetingsStarting with season 26 will change the method of determining the amount of prizes in meetings organized by our managers. The prize will not be chosen directly by the organizer, but it will be automatically calculated based on the number of races of the meeting.

This change is adopted mainly to try to increase both the importance of the dressing rooms, which in recent years has been overshadowed, but also to bring more money to users who win the more complex meetings.

Note that no prize will be deducted directly from the economy of users when organizing the competitions.

Here below the list of amounts:
Regional Meeting: 100 € for each race
National Meeting: 200 € for each race
Continental Meeting: 350 € for each race
International Meeting: 500 € for each race

As we said before, meeting completely lose every economic importance in the game. We also saw you inserted new competitions as the Continental Championship or Club International Championship. Did you do this choise to modify athletes’ sport managment to the most important events in the game?

Yes, there is also a meetings’ incomes formalization. It will allow us to put the meetings under control, in order to avoid every kind of exceptions created by a series of favorable events and not related to good technical performances. In this way, every team will earn money only related to the effort it will do. Instead, in the previous seasons you can earn more than 4-5 times more than an official competition.

Even from the standpoint of the fans and the experience, meetings don’t give benefits like the previous seasons. Now, the meetings’ incomes are permanently reduced. In FIT (Italian Federation), many users wrote that now Maxithlon lose all the targets he had before.

In Maxithlon you can choose between Individual and Club competitions (from Regional level to World level and all the competition has 3 categories: youth, senior and master), meetings, NL and many other little/big fatctors (candidacy, records). So, speaking about “mono-target” is a little bit stupid.

In FIT, many users think that this change can really give an advantage to the users which made an investment in the dressing room, becouse it isn’t really convenient to enroll all the atlethes in a meeting. Maybe make an investment in the dressing room could be convenient if it could be possible win a meeting with 48 event with less enrolled athletes than 48. But now winning a meeting seems more difficult than before and it seems related to luck. An example: if we enroll 12 athletes in a meeting with 48 events, it’s enough that a team enroll 13 or 14 athletes in the last seconds to win the prize.

Precisely for this reason we reduced the prizes in the meetings.

Regarding the prizes, could you confirm to us that the prizes wont be charged when you create the competition neither when the competition will be over?

Yes, i confirm it.

Now, we speak about the Favorite Event that in this season will work full. In the last season it had a important impact in the game…in fact, many world record were beaten. We are sure that this idea is really positive becouse it allows to fight one of the Maxithlon’s distortions: the athletes with more than a WR. The problem is that the Favorite Event has a limit: you can change it in the seasons, so the recordmen could be ever and ever the same athletes. Did you ever thought to make it definitive when an athlete become 25 years old?

All of this it’s happened in part by the Favorite Event but we have to think that the biggest part of the world record were beaten anyway (and many WR weren’t beaten with the FE). We didn’t think to block the Favorite Event, but we have to wait many other data before to think new evolutions for it.

Many World Record would not beaten without the FE (and also without over 28y old skills’ decrease). Is it right to reward these managers? Probably you thought a lot before insert this new change…

As before, probably “many” is not the right word, becouse the beaten records’ number doesnt’ appear bigger than the other seasons (but Tsunami is coming with a new development for a good news and probably he will prove me wrong…but i don’t want to say other thing about it).

The only criticism for this new change is that probably now we have a reduced strategy. Maybe we will see ever and ever the same athletes in the same events in NL as in the last days…

Probably we lose strategy for the athletes on the events….but the team’s strategy could be larger than before. I don’t think that the strategy is now reduced…i think it is changed.

Now do we want to speak about the coaches’ number decrease? Do you want to explain us this change? We know you told us that you did it to decrease the management costs, but if we consider the sporting side of the game, why didn’t you give us 15 coaches to train in the best way 60+5 athletes?

Because is not economic sustainable to train 60+5 athletes (and not only for the costs, but also because if you train everything on your own, we wont have athletes on the market). After it, we have to explain what does “train better” means…because this change was created for every team and not only for some of them. If for “train better” we mean to beat a world record, we have to remember we inserted the favorite event to compensate.

Continental Championship’s prizes are proportional to the competition’s level and every season you check it, why don’t you do the same thing for the NL, for the National Championship and for the Individual Championship. You did it only partially for the NL with the TV Incomes…

Time to time, we don’t have to think to take the small teams to being poor…by the way, i don’t see small teams in the international standing although lot of them play since a lot of time.

Now we can speak about the candidacies’ modifies…isn’t the arena’s appeal too important than the ranking? Is the turnover the best reason for this change?

Turnover is a must, the perfect formula is impossible to create becouse the candidacies are a lot and who organize is only one. We increased the official competitions and we ensured a turnover thanks to the arena’s appeal and many others parameters. In this way we minimized the objective criticism to the system. But we will ever have disgruntled ( and it happen becouse we have a relationship “of many to one”).

Ned, we want to thank you for you availability for this interview. Thank you and Tsunami for your engagement to improve ever and ever this fantastic game.